Variations on a theme of Boole and Stein–Weiss

We give an alternative proof of a theorem of Stein and Weiss: The distribution function of the Hilbert transform of a characteristic function of a set E only depends on the Lebesgue measure | E | of such a set. We exploit a rational change of variable of the type used by George Boole in his paper “On the comparison of transcendents, with certain applications to the theory of definite integrals” together with the observation that if two functions f and g have the same L p norm in a range of exponents p 1 < p < p 2 then their distribution functions coincide.